Archon Fung Discusses Democracy, Citizen Participation

Please tell me about the work you’ve done in the area of deliberative democracy.

I do work in public deliberation and deliberative democracy and citizen participation. [O]ne premise of that work…is that an appealing idea of democratic government is a government in which the laws and policies flow from deliberation and argument and reason among citizens.

People think of deliberative democracy as quite different from aggregative democracy, in which the laws and policies are products of just…“counting up heads”….The problem with aggregative conceptions of democracy is that they can oftentimes result in unjust policies or even unwise policies when [people’s] preferences…are either not well-informed, or maybe they’re unjust…

Recent experiments have actually put some of these notions of deliberate democracy into practice. Can you talk about some of those experiments?

[W]hen I began this work…I think it’s fair to say that in the academic world…a lot of people are already working on deliberation, but they were thinking about it as kind of an ideal of how societies ought to be. And one criticism is that these ideals and theories never quite touch the ground. And so what does deliberative practice look like, what does it look like when people actually deliberate, or policy-making is actually connected to deliberation…?

And in recent years, there have been some experiments, but not just experiments….[I]t’s become more and more common for some kinds of policy-making, especially at the state and local level, but also at larger levels, to incorporate elements of citizen or deliberation participation.

[Y]ou have some really old examples. The town meeting that everybody knows about, and even older [examples like] classical Greece…that’s one kind of face-to-face democracy. But now, you see examples and experiments springing up all over the place and all over the world.

…[A] famous example comes from Porto Alegre, Brazil, and that’s the participatory budget….[I]n…probably…the late 1980s, they changed how they formulate…the infrastructure portion of the city budget…to a system in which it’s not a planning department or a budgeting department or even a city council that decides how to allocate that money. But it’s allocated over a year through a structure of direct citizen participation, in which people from every neighborhood kind of show up and they say, “Well, for our neighborhood, the first priority is water,” or it’s electrification, or it’s schools, or it’s housing, or whatever it is. And then what they say gets added up across the city and that becomes the eventual budget for that year.

The problem that that structure solves is a problem of patronage and corruption…

What has happened since is that much, much more of the money has actually gone toward infrastructure spending, and there’s some evidence to show that the spending that results is much more closely aligned with what people want.

It’s such an interesting example because one of the first questions you hear in these sorts of conversations is about the extent to which the citizenry can be involved in complicated political decisions. You hear things like, “Well, the legislators are there full-time. They’re involved in these issues. They’re steeped in intricate insider knowledge. The average person is busy. He’s got a job or a family or both, and he just doesn’t have time to do that sort of thing.” And it sounds like the city of Porto Alegre put a pretty complicated question in front of these neighborhood groups, and the groups handled it with some aplomb.

Yeah, and they did. The advantage in Porto Alegre is that the issues that people are talking about are pretty palpable issues that affect their day-to-day life. You know, you can see whether or not the street needs paving….[P]eople know whether or not a community center or housing would be a good thing in their neighborhood…
…I think there is something to the argument that you offered, that professional legislators are – it’s their job to understand many complicated issues and to sort them out, and to sort out priorities. And unlike a lot of people who favor greater citizen participation, largely or exclusively for intrinsic reasons – that is, because they think more participation would just be a good thing in and of itself – I guess, I do think that, too. But I think that it’s most constructive to devote energy to creating direct citizen participation or popular deliberation in areas of governance and on issues where the representative machinery or the administrative machinery is broken…

To read the full interview, visit The Harvard Citizen Web site.